Well, you probably don’t. Wonder why little or nothing happens after women are told “you can’t do that here?” when they try to feed their children in restaurants? How is it possible that women lose their jobs when they try to take breaks to pump breast milk?

Now you can have not only the text of your law at your fingertips but an explanation of how your law works…or doesn’t. Be better prepared for the (still unlikely) event you are harassed in public. Know whether your state legislature needs to pass a better law. And be a part of the change you want to see in the world (yes, I stole that from Gandhi).

On each state page, please feel free to share your experience nursing or pumping in that state, good or bad. Not only will each page have the most current legal information on breastfeeding in that state, but the experiences of mothers who live under those laws.

Please read the copyright page before using this website. Seriously. Read it.

And share this resource. Telling moms they have a right when they don’t sets them up for humiliation and trauma. Holding a nurse-in, then going home and forgetting about it doesn’t spare the next mom. If a state has an enforceable law, know how the enforcement works. And if you want to fight for a country in which women are free to breastfeed and pump without harassment or fear of losing their jobs, then let’s do it together.

If you find any errors or updates in these pages, please leave a comment on the appropriate page. However, if you ask a question or post a comment that shows you have not read the articles first, I won’t respond. Yo, man, I have a life too.

To fully understand how enforcement provisions work, please read the article on this website – particularly Lactation and the Law.

The short answer to the question is that if a law has no enforcement provision, there is nothing you can do if the law is broken. The vast majority of public breastfeeding laws in the United States have no enforcement provision. That means that while a state may have a law that says a mother has a right to breastfeed in public, if someone harasses her while she does it, there is probably no legal action she can take against the harasser. Depending on the circumstances of a particular incident, there may be a lawsuit a lawyer can bring but, by and large, women can not afford lawyers, few lawyers will take breastfeeding cases pro bono, and there are few viable legal claims. In short, a breastfeeding law without an enforcement provision is of little to no value to breastfeeding women.

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